What song is it, that you wanna hear?

Water

I had a late evening bus on 24th night from Bangalore ( Karnataka) to go to Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu). In the last minute the bus got cancelled as the buses with Karnataka Registration were not being allowed in Tamil Nadu. This was as a consequence of Karnataka declining to share the water until 28th of this month post the Supreme Court verdict.

I had taken this new masters course in public policy partly to zoom out of my present frame of reference which is established from my work at grassroots. The other reason was to work in areas of environemnt other than water. Since the Kaveri issue has resurfaced this year, it looks like water is become a centre to many crisis of our times. Some researchers and activist have been talking about the dooms day being just around the corner. Especially verdicts on water being the centre of future wars. Scholars like Peter Gleick, Asit Biswas and other have been writing extensively about crisi and how to go about it. I thought we would pick what these people say and work it out somehow.

I somehow always felt this will not be the case. We will some how figure it out, get our act as a species. No! This Kaveri/ Cauvery water issue is only making all these doomd day verdicts come true.

I was sitting one day thinking how do we go about these issues of crisis of water. I felt its quite complex the whole issue of water. Its so entertwined with every aspect of life and activities we humans conduct. To be honset we have done enough to understand the root causes of the crisis – the loop holes in the way we address drinking waer security, the change in croping patterns and crops in the command area of Cauvery river and other water uses. In short it is flawed decissions on water usage and mismanagement of resource and also mismanagement within institutions using the water for different purposes. There have been solutions studied and proposed to address all these matters both technicaly, and institutionally. The paradigm of integrated water resource management gives a framework to work on all issues simultaneously.

But still, Why are these solutions not picked up? Where is the inertia, what is the threat in changing to newer paradigm of operation? It feels like its in our minds. The inertia is in our heads. I wonder, how do we go beyond the finger pointing excercise and think for our own selves and look for a solution which will make sense to ourselves in the long run too?

The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis

A proposition that seems to come to me again and again is that of “propaganda” as the mode of operation. Why dont we use skills of the O&Ms and Lowe Lintas kind of agenceis to work on the heads of the population to address issues of this kind? Why do we engage them to change mindset of people only to make “fairness” a fad thing or to sell chocolates? I am tempted to drop this documentary that I have been studying for the last few weeks to push the idea of propaganda. It speaks a lot on what can be done to manipulate the “crowds”. Why not use the same for a meaninful purpose. If not done responsibly this can spin out in a wrong direction and out of control. But for now this is all is coming to me as a solution again and again.

The water dispute of Kaveri between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu is more than a century old. Somehow the issue is racked up only in period of scarce monsoon. Else both states sit quiet and continue to do what they were at without giving a hard look at what are they are doing with their agriculture.

There have been many agreements between the states, tribunals set up to resolve issues, and supreme court intervening in the case and giving some random judgements without much scientific reasoning. These have been during the periods of distress again.

When I looked at this issue in 2008 I thought we could solve the matter with tribunals. But when I look at this matter again – the canvas looks much different. The legal aspects and general managerial aspects of the canvas were then not quite clear. But now there seems to be a nuanced understanding. First of the legal aspect of it – why is there no judgement / tribunal verdict on water sharing specific to “rainfall shortage years” or “distress years”? If the clause and details of the hearings were based on scientific studies conducted on the basin, one can come up with the possible sharing quotas based on the yearly rainfall that the basin sees. Second is, why are both states not seeing that- the paddy ( in Tamil Nadu) and sugarcane (in Karnataka) are not the crops one would grow using a non-perineal river source. There as a reason why raggi was grown so prolifically in these parts of the country. Raggi and other millets did not need so much water like paddy or sugarcane needs.

Also, another matter is that of the classic conflict between upper riparian and lower riparian states. The upper riparian state like Karnataka always have the control of – how much water they CHOOSE to give, and lower riparians have to seek courts and tribunal’s intervention to get water to meet their state needs.

When I spent sometime this morning looking at the tweets from kanadigas on the #cauveriverdict, I could only laugh at their ignorance. On both sides there are farmers, both sides need water for drinking water purpose. It is not easy to say who is correct or not. While Karnataka has around four major rivers flow in its state, Tamil Nadu’s rivers are not as many. The Kaveri that is damned in Karnataka is not even serving all the four districts equally. It is Bangalore that gets most of the Kaveri when developed in stage I, II and III. This without rectifying the 65% unaccounted for water loss ( through rusted, old pipelines built by British) in Bangalore is not a fair argument. Bangalore’s lakes which were augmenting the water requirements of the city are fast vanishing to meet the real estate needs of the city. Had the lakes been in place, the pipelines in good shape and compulsory rainwater harvesting done by all, the dependency of Bangalore on Kaveri/Kabini would have been reduced substantially. This would have eased the conflict too. While the larger managerial issues are never addressed, all people do by the end of the day to go on strikes and burn public properties to make their point and get what they want. This is no rational way to arrive at any solution.

Situation in both the states , its political response and people’s response is quite saddening and disappointing to the least!